This chapter introduces the geographic area covered by the book. It reviews the changes that have taken place since the previous edition in 2007, in terms of the people who live there, their distribution, and the languages they use, showing that Britain and Ireland are becoming increasingly multiethnic and are homes to a rich array of languages and dialects. It also provides an overview of the rest of the book.

Over c. 50 years, language education has been a significant site of ideological struggle over England’s position in the world, and the last two decades have seen intensification in the assertion of English nationalism in central government. Our analysis of this history starts with the development of multicultural language education in the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting the factors that contributed to this: activist pressure from minority communities, educational philosophies valuing the ‘whole child’, educational decision-making embedded in local democratic structures, and a legislative strategy that promotied good community relations. This started to change in the 1990s, with the curriculum centralisation and the side-lining of LEAs initiated by the Thatcher government. Efforts to regulate increased population movement also made borders and immigration status more of a priority than multiculturalism, and after 2001, security, social cohesion and the suspicion of Muslims started to dominate public discourse. These developments are analysed in six areas of language education policy: standard English, English as an additional language for school students, English for adult speakers of other languages, modern languages, and community languages in mainstream and supplementary schools. Finally, we consider the role of universities in these processes.

This chapter presents on overview of present-day Welsh English(es) with a focus on regional variation and diachronic developments over the past fifty years. The Anglicisation of Wales has progressed in several phases over the centuries, which is why the accents and dialects of English in Wales are regionally distinctive, the Welsh language and neighbouring English English dialects impacting them to different degrees. The chapter takes the Survey of Anglo-Welsh dialects (Parry 1999) as a starting point and uses corpus and survey data compiled in the twenty-first century as well as recent research publications, thereby examining the main trends of development in the different domains of English. Phonological variation and change are described across a broad North–South continuum, whereas in morphosyntax the greatest differences can be found between the predominantly English-speaking Southeast and the bilingual, historically Welsh-dominant North and West Wales. In regional lexicon, sociolinguistically and nationally salient items are relatively few, originating from both Welsh and English. Finally, the chapter draws attention to recent research, and highlights some caveats and future directions for the study of English in Wales.

This chapter discusses linguistic variation in Slavic languages by presenting an overview of the relationship between human communication in the society and the corresponding linguistic features. In this chapter we focus on the parameters of variation according to the language user, such as age or dialects, and according to the language use, such as communicative functions or communication styles, e.g. politeness. We cite both qualitative and quantitative methods for studying aspects of sociolinguistic variation. Examples are drawn from large corpora of two Slavic languages, Russian and Serbo-Croatian, with a particular focus on academic writing, news reporting, and reporting personal experience in social media, as well as from dictionaries and field studies.

This chaper looks at the peculiar mixture of linguistic forms that are archaic and dialectal in Homer and compares them to the hybrid dialects that are employed in English-language popular music today. Sections 1 and 2 provide a detailed account of the main linguistic features of Homer’s Kunstsprache and separates its archaic components from its dialectal components. Section 3 looks at perceptions of dialect (and dialect imitations) in Archaic Greece. Sections 4-5 illustrate how ancient and modern critics interpreted Homer’s dialect, and introduces phase theory, along with remaining open questions therein. Section 6 introduces several contemporary case studies of singers adopting a non-native, hybrid dialect of English when performing. These include Adele, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Green Day, Alesha Dixon, the Arctic Monkeys, Iggy Azalea, and Keith Urban. Lessons won from these case studies are then applied to Homer.

This chapter concludes the book by summarizing the main results and discussing future prospects of study.

In the Conclusion, we outline a series of methodological and ethical considerations for scholars interested in researching the intersections of language and hope, particularly as they are practiced and manifested among marginalized and disenfranchised communities. Faveladas/os reveal a great deal of awareness of the extractivist tendencies of field research and their critical stance in advancing an agenda for sociolinguistic scholarship that is reflexive to more responsible, sustainable, and dialogic practices vis-à-vis interlocutors’ agendas and ethical concerns. Further, because we attend to knowledge about language produced by everyday people, we emphasize the need to be mindful of alternative and unconventional forms of knowledge production toward an ongoing understanding of the ways in which language can lead to hopeful futures. In short, insofar that hope demands that we reorient our view of the future and temporality more broadly, an understanding of language as hope demands that we reorient our assumptions of what counts as producing legitimate knowledge about language.

This chapter investigates scaling in the work of hope. We foreground how hope is not merely an abstract aspiration but a principled, time-oriented praxis by showcasing how hope can be meaningfully pursued when scaled through pedagogical work. Our cases include the central NGOS/activist groups in our ethnography, namely Instituto Raízes em Movimento, Instituto Marielle Franco, and Coletivo Papo Reto. We examine, for instance, the case of how Raízes em Movimento appropriates and rescales the trope of “circulando,” a policing practice premised on the criminalization of faveladas/os. We afterwards examine the case of artistic and organizational responses to the historical and contemporary silencing of Blacks in Brazil, examining the case of Favela Não Se Cala alongside the activist work of the Instituto Marielle Franco. We then look to the work of Coletivo Papo Reto who perform pedagogical work representing the transformative ethos of papo reto activist register. This collective work highlights the teachable–scalable–dimensions of hope through sociolinguistic action, by which hope comes to be rescaled from mere abstraction toward a form of social change.

The Introduction describes the fundamental objective of the book, which is to discuss what language can teach us about the practice of hope into the 21st century. Hope has always been critical to human survival, but the surge of right-wing populism, racism and ethnocentrism around the world spells hopelessness for many communities, including those whose backgrounds are subject to increased discrimination and precarization. Meanwhile, those in periphery contexts have lived in perpetual conditions of seeming hopelessness. Yet, they have not merely succumbed to despair but found creative ways of surviving material inequities. One key resource that faveladas/os have relied upon to hope is imagining language, temporality, digital technologies, and cooperation toward challenging past inequities and establishing socially equitable futures. They have also been very critical about the dynamics of knowledge production, including extractivist practices of academic scholars. These instances point to the importance of subjects’ reflexivity and practical work in producing conditions of hope.

This chapter outlines a theorization of language as hope. We begin with an understanding of language not merely as a fixed language system to communicate reality as such, but as an inherently flexible and negotiable practice that can reconstitute realities, in the sense of “languaging” (see Li, 2018). We approach languaging in relation to various conceptualizations of hope, beginning with Ernst Bloch’s (1986) pioneering account of hope as both an affect and a principle of explanation. As an affect, “Hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them” (p. 3). Temporally, hope orients people to the “Not-Yet-Being,” towards expansion and potentiality. This view of hope is complemented with various treatments within the social sciences and in sociolinguistics more specifically. In so doing, we propose that those who must grapple with enveloping challenges predicated on regimes of violence and economic dispossession do not merely succumb to hopelessness but instead have found ways to recast temporality, engage in tactical cooperation, and reimagine sociolinguistic resources in and through their everyday languaging toward the production of hope.

This chapter focuses on how hope demands an ever-shifting reorientation to time. We engage more fully with the case of Marielle Franco, a Black lesbian councilwoman from a favela who was brutally assassinated in 2018. Her spectral presence became an icon of hope for the dispossessed. We trace her “presence” in the range of protests and demonstrations that erupted following her death. We additionally analyze ethnographic accounts of women who were influenced by Marielle, online archives of their speeches, and news articles and social media material that circulated in the months following her murder. Additionally, we show how hope in Marielle’s communicative practice had an important pedagogic dimension in that she led others in the cultivation of adequate virtues, affects, and ideologies for surviving historical inequities and formations of violence. We thus illustrate how hope demands a reorientation to time–a disruption of the teleological time of progress, inverting taken-for-granted relations of causality. Temporality, in this sense, is “metaleptic” in that the past may belatedly inform the present, thereby not necessarily relying on chronology, linearity, or progress.